06 Nov ARTICLE | How the Internet was born: the ARPANET Comes to Life

This essay is the third of a four-part series, which commemorates the anniversary of the first ever message sent across the ARPANET, the progenitor of the Internet on October 29, 1969 – Read: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4.

After Charles Herzfeld, the Director of ARPA, gave his blessing to commence the first stage of the ARPANET project, Robert Taylor began circulating the plan to some ARPA’s contractors. Just like Baran, Taylor soon found that good ideas are not always easy to sell. The initial reaction to the ARPANET was one of suspicion: “Most of the people I talked to,” said Taylor, “were not initially enamoured with the idea”. Many feared that a network would be “an opportunity for someone else to come in and use their [computing] cycles”. However, the project finally started coming to life when Lawrence G. Roberts, a very talented researcher from the Lincoln Lab at MIT, was chosen as the ARPANET project manager.

Only 29 at the time, Roberts had already worked on another groundbreaking experiment in computer networks. In 1966, with his colleague Thomas Marrill, Roberts used the Western Union Telephone Line to link two super computers across the country (the Q–32 at the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California, and the TX–2 at the Lincoln Lab, in Lexington, Massachusetts) in a time-shared environment.

The experiment was a “testing environment” that aimed to verify whether it was possible to build a computer network on a continental scale “without enforcing standardisation”. Since the network was built “to overcome the problems of computer incompatibility”, it would have been ill-advised to enforce a standard protocol “as a prerequisite of membership in the network”. Instead, Roberts and Merrill argued, for a network to work efficiently, it required maximum flexibility.

If a protocol which is good enough to be put forward as a standard is designed, adherence to this standard should be encouraged but not required.

The idea of flexibility is an important building block of the Internet we use today. It allows the development of different networks, with different standards, all of which are able to connect with each other. This variety of networks and the lack of enforced standardisation, in time, have become a very important asset of the Internet. It has also made it a much more difficult environment to control as a whole.

From a purely technical perspective, Marrill and Roberts’ experiment proved that it was possible to connect different computers and share resources between them. However, both researchers faced the same problem Baran had foreseen for his distributed adaptive network: “dial communications based on the telephone network were too slow and unreliable to be operationally useful”.

As such, one of the important lessons learned from the experiment with the Q–32 and the TX–2 was that, in order to improve the speed and reliability the network, the programmers had to use packet–switching.

TXT-2 Lexington.Web

Larry Roberts was an advocate for “knowledge sharing”, believing that “sharing” everyone’s work was the only way to advance knowledge. Inspired by Licklider’s ideas of the Intergalactic Network, Roberts was fascinated by the untapped potential of a wide communication network linking symbiotically people, machines and resources. As Roberts explained:

At that point [in 1962], we had all of these people doing different things everywhere, and they were all not sharing their research very well. So you could not use anything anybody else did. Everything I did was useless to the rest of the world, because it was on the TX-2 and it was a unique machine. So unless the software was transportable, the only thing it was useful for was writing technical papers, which was a very slow process. So, what I concluded was that we had to do something about communications, and that really, the idea of the galactic network that Lick[lider] talked about, probably more than anybody, was something that we had to start seriously thinking about.

As soon as he was appointed the ARPANET Program Manager, Roberts began sketching out plans for the network. His starting point was the lesson he learnt while working with Marrill on linking the Q–32 and the TX–2 computers. He drew several sketches of the possible topology and, after discussing the network specifications with many fellow researchers – who included, among others, Licklider, Kleinrock, Donald Davies, Davies’ representative at the Gatlinburg Symposium, Roger Scantlebury, and Baran in Santa Monica – Roberts came up with two indispensable features for the network: a computer interface protocol that all 16 research groups participating in the project could accept; with the capacity to support the estimated 500, 000 packets of traffic per day between the 35 computers that were connected to the 16 hosts.

Who should build it?

As originally envisioned by Baran, the ARPANET was set to be a fully distributed network that made use of routers (small computers called Interface Message Processors – IMPs) at every node to speed up communication between computers. Each router had four critical tasks to accomplish:

to receive packets of data from both the computers connected to it,

break the message blocks into 128 byte packets, or 1024 bits (In his study of packet-switching, Donald Davies theorised that “the length of a packet can be any multiple of 128 bits up to 1,024 bits”. The 128-bit unit length guaranteed some measure of “flexibility to the size of packets” without ever overloading the computer while handling them.

add the destination and the sender address, and

use a “dynamically updated routing table”, or an updated map of the routes available in the network (“considering both line availability and queue lengths”) to send the packet over whichever free line was currently the fastest route toward the destination.

As in Baran’s distributed network, at each node, Roberts wrote, the “minicomputer would acknowledge it and repeat the routing process independently”.

On July 29, 1968, ARPA issued a “request for quotation” (RFQ) to several companies in the computer sector to build the network switches (the IMPs).

Some major companies, including IBM and Control Data Corporation (CDC), declined the offer, on the ground that packet–switching would never work. Others responded with detailed proposals. At the end of the day, the two best contenders for the contract were Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) and Raytheon. The former was a small company, the latter a major Defence contractor. Normally, Raytheon would have been the favourite to win this kind of contract. Yet, contrary to the Department of Defence logic, but in line with ARPA’s unconventional approach, in January 1969, BBN was awarded the $1 million contract to build four IMPs for a four-site network by the end of that year. The success of BBN’s bid was a clear sign of the anti-bureaucratic nature around which the Internet was originally built.

BBN ARPANET Group.Computer History/ Web

However small, BBN was, in the words of one of its most famous researchers Robert Khan, “the cognac of the research business, very distilled”. It was a sort of haven where people like Licklider worked, where dozens of graduate students and faculty members from either Harvard or MIT, free from any university duties but research, were encouraged “to do interesting things and move on to the next interesting thing”. They weren’t required to try “to capitalise on them once they had been developed.”

Moreover, unlike the other bidders, Frank Heart (Head of the Computer System Division at BBN) and his team submitted a 200-page detailed proposalwith flowcharts, calculations and tables explaining how the IMP network would work.

Interface Message Processor Front Panel.BBN

Certainly the well-crafted proposal was an important element in BBN’s winning bid, but it was not the only reason. In the decision taken by ARPA’s committee to award the contract to the team led by Frank Heart, two factors were decisive. First was Roberts’ personal acquaintance with many of the researchers at BBN. Some of them like Heart and Kahn had already informally participated in the early development of the ARPANET project. Licklider, who regularly collaborated with Roberts, also had strong ties with BBN. The second factor was Roberts’ dislike for bureaucracy: as per the style of major defence contractors, Raytheon’s proposal was very complex and presupposed an even more complex and multi-layered team in order to manage it.

In Roberts’ experience, Raytheon’s weighty bureaucratic structure would have not only made things more complicated, it would ultimately slowed down the whole project as well. Dealing with companies like Raytheon meant wasting half of your time trying to find the right person to talk to about any problems the project encountered. On the other hand, the BBN team was small and simple: Frank Heart was the head of the team and the whole communication process between ARPA and BBN only required a telephone call between Roberts and Heart.

ARPANET original sketch.DARPA

The first four nodes of the ARPANET Network were the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California Santa Barbabra (UCSB), the University of Utah, and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

The first computer was installed at UCLA September 1, 1969. UCLA was chosen because of Leonard Kleinrock and his ARPA’s funded Network Measurement Center. The centre focused on analysing and measuring the network traffic, as well as producing relevant statistics to be used in the implementation of the network. Stanford was selected because of Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation of Human Intellect project.

Engelbart was already an eminent figure in computer science (he is most renowned for the invention of the mouse). His work on developing a series of tools (a database, a text–preparation system, and a user–friendly interface messaging system) was vital for Roberts to make the network more user–friendly. The first connection between UCLA and SRI was the product of Kleinrock and Kline’s experiment on October 29, 1969. The first message ever sent over the ARPANET took place at 2230 hours. It was a message transmission between the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer and the SRI SDS 940 Host computer.

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2 weeks agoby sydneydemocracyProfessor Baogang He, Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University and Professor John Keane interrogate authoritarianism and democracy at ACRI UTS

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A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

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A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

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Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

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Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

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Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

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Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au